An Epilogue to a Long Life
by Polydicta
Summary: Hermione looks back over her long life with Harry. Character death. An epilogue to the epilogue.


**An Epilogue To A Long Life**

by Polydicta

Hermione looks back over her long life with Harry. An epilogue to the epilogue.

**Disclaimer: **

All fiction is derivative and fan fiction doubly so. I make no claim to own any part of any of the following, all I have done is an attempt to put together the elements in a novel fashion, using words and ideas like Lego ™ bricks.

There is no money involved – all I do is to share what I do for my own amusement.

-::::::::-

**An Epilogue To A Long Life**

Hermione lay back against her pillows, her hair making a sea of grey behind her as she thought back.

Harry was beside her, already asleep, his breath catching with every inhale and wheezing on every exhale.

She turned slightly to look at her husband of well over a century, and she smiled. So many memories.

They were dying. Such was life and death, and they had cheated death for so, so long.

"Are you all right Gran?" It was Anna Hermione, the eldest of their great grandchildren.

"Yes Love. It's all right, you can go to bed. We're not going to go dancing off into the sunset to have any mad adventures tonight."

Yes, that was right, she thought, the time of adventures was over for them, at least until they stepped onto the path of the next great adventure. She missed the adventures.

Her memory flickered, recalling their adventures in school and the war with Voldemort. The years of rebuilding spent with their first spouses Ron and Ginny.

Oh, what a mistake they were, looking back, but she still loved Ron, dead a century and a half. He knew that Harry still cared for Ginny who had out lived her brother by a mere week. It was those deaths that finally brought Harry back to her, she remembered, the comfort and reassurance of his solid presence.

Her mind turned to the promise a mere twenty years prior to those deaths, made one night in a tent.

.

_ "Hermione, no matter what happens to us, I'll always be here for you."_

_ "Harry, how can you promise that?"_

_ "I can and I have."_

_ She smiled. "Then I can do no less, Harry. No matter what, I will always be there for you, too."_

_.  
><em>

A chaste kiss had sealed the pact.

She remembered the birth of her and Ron's children, and of Harry and Ginny's.

She remembered the rise of the new Dark Lord, cringing at the memory of one of their former friends' rise to power. Blaize Zambini had waged a one-wizard war against who knew what. His band of followers as blood-crazed as he.

At the end it had been Harry and she who had ended the war with, of all things, a muggle hand grenade and a permanent sticking charm, but not before he had killed her husband and Harry's wife among the hundreds of other casualties of his rampage.

A silent tear slid down her cheek.

A hand was suddenly there, wiping the tear away. He hadn't even woken up.

She held his hand to her cheek, remembering that at forty she had been a widow, and he a widower.

After Zambini's defeat, Harry had left the Auror Corps claiming that there had been too much heartbreak and that he needed to work somewhere that didn't involve dark wizards.

He was called in to the Ministry of Magic to clear his desk and was told that he had been given a post in the DMLE. He was about to refuse when someone told him that he could make a difference as the head of the DMLE.

Cornered by the Minister of Magic, he accepted the post.

She and Harry began to fall back into love with the deaths of their spouses, initially clinging to each other in their grief. Five years later they were married. Oh, and what a wedding …

.

_"I Harry James do take you for my handfast wife – joined in body and soul, in spirit and magic from this moment forward until the end of all things. So mote it be."_

_"I Hermione Jean do take you for my handfast husband – joined in body and soul, in spirit and magic from this moment forward until the end of all things. So mote it be."_

_They had kissed and a golden nimbus had surrounded them, illuminating them as if under the summer's sun._

_There was uproar as the congregation realised that they had made the declaration of soul-bond, something neither had done when they had married their first spouses._

_.  
><em>

That night Hermione had fallen pregnant with the twins, two bushy-haired witches with green eyes. Two powerful witches almost from birth. Annie and Maggie they were.

Harry had managed to get dispensation for home-schooling them in magic from the age of seven rather than involving the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad at least daily. They were on first-name terms with those particular wizards and witches, and had remained friends with them since.

Eighteen months later, the next addition was Ewan, a brown-haired spit of his father, another who had his first wand at eight.

Then followed at regular intervals Richard, Ally, the second twins Rowan and Betony, then Sylvie and the last, Arthur.

Hermione had given up work and was home-schooling her children full-time. All were like their first with their magic overflowing constantly. Every last one of the children had inherited their father's magical strength and their mother's thirst for knowledge … and their combined sense of justice and what was _right_.

Harry had been made Minister of Magic around the time that Ewan had first manifested his magic. One of Harry's first law changes was to the Decree for the Control of Under Age Magic. As on the continent, it was now legal for children to learn and to practice magic at home under adult supervision, provided that the Statute of Secrecy was not broken. Special magical gymnasia were instituted across the country to allow children to practice together outside of school.

After serving ten years as minister and breaking the back of the pure-blood stranglehold on Magical Britain, he stepped down, accepting a teaching position at Hogwarts, and the whole family moved to the Potter's property on the edge of Hogsmead. A few acres of woodland and grass, well warded and fenced that became the country's first magical junior school, with Hermione Potter as the first headmistress. Admission was by magical test or a recommendation from the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad.

At seventy, Harry had become Headmaster at Hogwarts. He and Hermione had finally retired at one hundred and seventy, and had settled down to write the books they had always threatened to write.

They had embarked on a career as best-selling authors. Somehow, their youthful exploits had passed from painful memory into history, they were the last living link to that time. Both wrote books on magic as well as their exploits, and Hermione discovered in her a flair for writing fiction.

She had slaked her thirst for adventure in fiction. She realised now how much she missed her adventures. Their adventures, hers and Harry's.

.

Hermione's mind returned to the present, brought by a warm hand on her tummy.

"Sickel for them, 'Mione?"

"Just wool-gathering, Love. Just wool-gathering."

"We both do a lot of that these days, don't we?"

She nodded.

"I love you, Harry. I don't want to be parted from you."

He sat up. Then, leaning across her, tenderly kissed the tears from her eyes.

"Me neither Love. I love you too much."

His hand was wandering, tracing the scars of their adventures across her skin. It was something he had often done.

She felt a warmth at her core, and an electricity across her skin. She dragged his face to hers and initiated a kiss. She felt him stir against her.

Their lovemaking was tender and unhurried and after, sated and relaxed, she snuggled against her husband's side, her head pillowed on his chest. She slept, feeling his still strong arm around her, and his gentle hand upon her.

And so they slept.

.

In the morning it was Ewan who brought them their morning tea. It was Ewan who found them still in that loving embrace, sleeping the sleep of eternity.

They were laid in their mausoleum close to Dumbledore's tomb, undisturbed. Somehow, it seemed sacrilegious to separate them, so they were laid as they had been found, amid the mourning of the generations of British wizardkind.

And so passed the last survivors of the Battle of Hogwarts, the Man-Who-Conquered, and his eternally faithful companion, the Girl-Who-Loved.

.

.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, a train was waiting.

"What took you so long?"

"It was only seconds."

"Really? It seemed like a lifetime. You look good, Love."

She nodded. "I feel a lot better actually. I must say, I always preferred you with your hair black, Love. Distinguished as grey may be, black is how I always think of that … have you combed it since you arrived."

He gave her a lop-sided grin. "Yes, and yours is back to how it was at school."

He turned and fell over their old school trunks. Picking himself up he looked at her.

"Any guesses as to the next great adventure?"

She was looking past him. Then there was a flurry of white feathers landing on his shoulder.

"Hedwig!"

The snowy owl bobbed her head and held out her leg. Harry took the envelope.

"It's from Dumbledore. He says that he'll explain when we get to the castle. There's trouble. Something that he needs us to do."

He handed the envelope with it's remaining contents to Hermione.

"Come on, let's get on board, it looks like it'll be a long journey."

Harry loaded the trunks on board the train and glanced along the tracks where they passed from the station and across green meadows that had never existed in the living world, at least, not since the _real_ railway was built.

Entering the compartment with his love, she pinned his head boy badge on him.

"It looks like we're going home."

"Yes, adventures and all."

They kissed tenderly and passed, at last, into legend


End file.
